Marcella Pattyn

Marcella Pattyn, who has died aged 92, was the last of the Beguines — a
religious movement of laywomen founded in the Middle Ages.

In the late 12th century a Flemish priest named Lambert le Begue established a community in Liège for the widows of crusaders who had not returned from the Holy Land. Without a protector, such women often felt obliged to seek security by joining a religious order, but many of them did not wish to devote their lives exclusively to religion. Called Beguines, the women lived in walled districts called beguinages.

Beguines took no religious vows. They could leave and marry, if they chose. They could own property and took no alms. Women of all classes were welcomed, and wealthy Beguines often brought their servants with them. They carried on professions, often in the textile industry; they did good works, such as teaching or caring for the sick. They elected women — Grandes Dames — to lead their communities. Each Beguine was expected to support herself and make a contribution to the beguinage, through work or rent payments. They had no motherhouse, no common rule, no general of the order. Every community was run according to its own rules.

Such institutions flourished in northern Europe in the High Middle Ages, particularly in the Low Countries, in northern France and the Rhineland, although they never took off in England, Norwich being the only city where there is evidence of such informal female communities.

In his book Cities of Ladies, the historian Walter Simons has argued that Beguines pursued a vocation different from that offered by either marriage or the convent: the ability to earn one’s own living while caring for the disadvantaged “in the world” rather than sequestered from it. Beguine records indicate that residents of beguinages often actively sought to avoid marriage and helped their sisters to do likewise. Some have described them, anachronistically, as the feminists of the medieval world.

The Beguines’ ambiguous social and religious status was highly disturbing to medieval men, particularly in the Church. Even before the Protestant Reformation got going, they were often attacked as heretics and some perished at the stake. They were persecuted under Popes Clement V, John XXII, Urban V and Gregory XI, though they were rehabilitated in the 15th century by Eugene IV. By the 20th century the movement had largely retreated to a few beguinages in Belgium.

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Marcella Pattyn was born in the Belgian Congo on August 18 1920 and, as a child, dreamed of entering a missionary religious order. But as she was almost blind she was rejected by several communities. It was only when a rich aunt intervened with a donation that she was accepted into the beguinage of St Amandsberg in Ghent in 1941.

There, and at the beguinage of St Elizabeth at Courtrai, where she moved in 1960, she spent her days praying, knitting clothes, weaving and making Beguine dolls, which she sold to tourists. She played the organ in the chapel and gave comfort to the sick by entertaining them on the banjo or accordion. In her later years she became a familiar figure in the streets of Courtrai, whizzing around in a motorised wheelchair.

In 1960 she was one of a community of nine. By 2008, when she moved into a nursing home, she had become, officially, the only surviving Beguine in the world.